elegant interaction

This year I've had the exciting opportunity to be involved with IA Summit 2009. "Principles of UX Leadership" is the poster that I had the privilege to design with a former colleague and mentor, Joe Sokohl. Scheduled this evening at the Summit is a Poster Reception, during which our poster will be featured along with others. (Although I am not able to attend in person, I will be there in spirit!) Now more than ever, the UX community needs practitioners to step up into leadership roles. As Joe illustrates, leadership is "more than just completing a wireframe or writing a Twitter post; instead, leadership is the art of inspiring people to accomplish goals." Here's a few of the sound principles that Joe offers:

• Know yourself and seek self-improvement, both in the field and personally: Make sure that you understand what you want to do in this field, why you want to do it, and how to ground yourself.
• Seek responsibility and take responsibility for your actions: Your designs and those of your team matter. They have real impacts on people. Make sure that you take a sense of ownership and feel responsible for users' successes and failures. Strive to take on more responsibility for larger areas of product development.
• Set the example for your peers, your staff, and your superiors: Not only should you be a good UX designer, you need to set the example in your demeanor, your work ethic, and your devotion to both client and user success.
• Know your users as well as your staff, and look out for their welfare: It's critical for you as a leader to make sure that users' needs are addressed in their experience with products you work on. At the same time, take care of your people, ensuring that their needs are met.
• Keep your staff informed: You need to ensure users know what they need to do in their tasks, but you also need to keep both project team members as well as your staff are knowledgeable about what is going on, what is expected, and what effect actions might have.
• Build the team: This principle applies to both the UX team you lead, the development teams you work with, or the project team, or all. Building the team means imparting sound guidelines and principles of UX design & development.
• Assign your staff wisely: As a practitioner, you make sure that what you design meets users needs, goals, and task expectations. At the same time, pay attention to the people on your team. Are they working on projects they have the ability to work on? Do you have someone who's interested in Little IA doing Big IA deliverables?

View the poster to see all of the leadership principles.